Indian 2 Review | The Return of Thatha Can Take Your Tolerance Levels to Zero

Shankar’s Indian was released in 1996, and for people like me, it is a part of childhood nostalgia largely due to the songs and set pieces. If I am not wrong, it sort of showed us this world of large-scale vigilante justice movies. After Indian, we have seen various iterations of mass movies that talk against corruption, and Shankar himself has made movies like Muthalvan and Anniyan. The reason why I am going back to the 28-year history of mass cinema is because the storytelling pattern has evolved over a period of time, and the audience is well aware of that pattern. My curiosity going into Indian 2 was to know whether director Shankar is aware of that evolution happened to the audience, and to my disappointment, he still thinks the same tools he used for Indian are enough to satisfy an audience who has a wide variety of options to get entertained.

So, in the current day, a group of youngsters are fighting against corruption by mocking the people who took bribes or did illegal stuff by creating comical sketches on their YouTube channel. They were under the impression that they were creating some changes, but later, they realized that beyond the likes and shares, nothing was happening in society. At that point, they remembered Senapathy, aka Indian Thatha, and they started to trend this hashtag #ComeBackIndian. How that campaign goes and how the return of Indian causes changes in the society is what we see in Shankar Shanmugam’s Indian 2.

Back in 1996, when the entertainment options were minimal, the audience was less familiar with grandeur. Creating set pieces and songs just for the sake of it was something people didn’t really bother about. It’s been 28 years, and even the Tamil audience was raving about Manjummal Boys for not having any heroine or dance numbers, as the story doesn’t demand such things. The problem with Indian 2 is that it is extremely flat in terms of storytelling. On a script level, it is far too basic. And the beats are very familiar. It’s like Shankar’s list of people to target had familiar names like Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi, etc., and he is using his grandeur cover-up strategy in creating the sequences that kill this variety of villains. The speeches you get in this installment are pretty lame, and the efforts to make Senapathy a man with a swagger are not really working.

It is a movie that runs for more than three hours, and the only reason why you don’t feel like storming out of the theater is the pace with which things are happening. Shankar is almost becoming Hari as scenes are juggling between various states in India. When the vigilante mode of Thatha backfires in the last quarter of the film, I was hoping to see a peculiar conflict that Shankar had created in almost all his successful ventures. Unfortunately, nothing remarkable happens, and instead of something dramatic, we see a 100+-year-old man doing all kinds of James Bond action stuff on an electric unicycle on the roads of Chennai, markets, and even inside the Chennai metro. Apart from the punchy beats of the Come Back Indian song, Anirudh couldn’t really make the experience special through his scores or songs.

Shankar wants to say so many things inside one movie, and every subplot featuring the Barking Dogs characters doesn’t even get time to land. Shankar is trying to recreate a similar dynamic between Chandru and Senapathy through Chitra and Senapathy. But the kind of exhaustion you feel seeing the generic scaled-up murders of buffoonish big billionaires won’t give you the energy to empathize with Chitra or Senapathy. The imaginations are kind of wild and hasty, making us scratch our heads continuously because of the unbearable exaggeration. The believability achieved through makeup is kind of debatable. The visual effects aren’t that great. The set pieces have scale, but the catchiness you feel in a Shankar movie action block is not there. The production design is exquisite, as always, for a Shankar film. But again, there is no wow factor because of the shallow storytelling.

This version of Senapathy has more swagger than the Senapathy we have seen in the first film. I guess tragedy in life and swagger are inversely proportional. The prosthetic makeup sort of sticks out, making us focus less on the acting. Siddharth, as Chitra Aravindan, and his co-actors in the Barking Dogs gang are forced to do this overtly emotional characters. Bobby Simha, who plays the role of the son of the character played by Nedumudi Venu in the previous film, is reduced to a mere Shikari Shambu. Vivek and Nedumudi Venu are in the movie, with some sequences having artificially generated versions of them. Some of the antagonists in the film may not even know the names and backstories of their characters as the runtime is really small.

By the time the movie reaches the climax, we have this sequence where the whole public’s sentiment is against Indian, and a new hashtag #GoBackIndian starts to trend. Well, it might not be intentional, but the level of utopian dreams and impulsive execution strategy of the old man might make even the Gen Z folks say, “Go Back Indian.” The movie ends with Indian promising that he will return, and Shankar shows us some visuals of Indian 3, which is expected to be released six months from now. The tagline of this film was Zero Tolerance, and my tolerance level stooped to zero. What’s concerning is the fact that the next one’s tagline is War Mode.